


For Love and Laughter

by mxingno



Category: Love! Valour! Compassion! - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol-Induced Consent Issues, Fatal Mistakes, HIV/AIDS, M/M, Newspaper Immolation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 15:32:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mxingno/pseuds/mxingno
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When it happens, John Jeckyll knows full well that it ought to have happened to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Love and Laughter

**Author's Note:**

> Written for queer_fest 2013, for the prompt 'John and James Jeckyll, how each was affected differently by the outbreak of AIDS.'
> 
> (For the record, Andrew Lloyd Webber is -- at least according to appearances -- straight.)

**1985**  
The body on his bed is eager and warm, all well-honed muscle and long dancer's limbs, and all the more lovely for the haze of alcohol through which John sees it -- _him,_ not it, this shameless social climber of a boy who's been flirting with him since rehearsals began. His legs lock together around John's waist, urging John closer and their hips together, and he throws back his head and moans like a whore when John rocks back against him; he's drunk, they're both drunk, on the success of opening night and on mediocre beer that tasted of nothing. Not so drunk as to be insensible, though -- or at least, John isn't. John braces his hands against the boy's thighs, pushes them apart until the boy is splayed out across the bed; he kneels up, fumbles at the fly of his jeans, and he's hard enough that it almost hurts as he leans close to savage the boy's throat with lips and teeth and tongue--

"Wait," says the boy, and for a moment his voice is no more than vibrations against John's open mouth. "Wait."

"For what?" John asks, and doesn't stop. "It doesn't _feel_ as though you're lagging behind, duck--"

"You want to fuck me, right?" And it's that frankness, in the end, that gives John pause. Perhaps the boy in his bed is not quite drunk enough for insensibility, either. "Because if you do then you're using a condom. Where do you keep them?"

He's reaching for the bedside table drawer before John can catch his hand and guide it away. "I don't keep them," he says, and presses another, sharper kiss to the jut of the boy's collarbone. "Should I?"

"Well, yeah." The boy wriggles underneath him; it takes John a moment to recognise discomfort, as opposed to delight. "Do you even read the news?"

(He has been doing his utmost to avoid it. He is not going to admit this to a boy perhaps half his age.)

"You're worrying too much," he says instead, but when he tries to press the boy back down to the bed, he meets only resistance. "For God's sake, it's not as though I've _got_ anything--"

"Sure," says the boy, and doesn't even try to sound convinced. "Whatever. But you're still not fucking me. I'll jerk you off if you want, that's fine, but you're not getting anywhere near my ass without a condom."

John very nearly asks _I don't suppose I could haggle for a blowjob?_ but it hardly seems the time; there's a sort of resolve in the boy's eyes that's somehow more unsettling than any of the headlines John might have turned the page to avoid first thing in the morning. "Fine," he concedes, and flops down beside the boy on the mattress -- it does something odd to his centre of gravity, for a moment, but the moment passes quickly enough, the way moments generally do. "Fine," he says again, once the world's righted itself, and it _should_ be fine, when the boy wraps his warm, spit-slick hand around John's cock and starts to jerk him off with practiced ease. It should be fine, but it isn't, and there's a vague fluttering of apprehension in John's chest that won't let him forget. 

***

 **1986**  
They aren't kissing while they open the door -- not quite. James's building is populated largely by up-and-coming City businessmen and comfortably-retired elderly couples; one must remember discretion. But when the door is closed and locked behind them, discretion can't follow them in -- Adam kisses not like an actor but like an academic, committing every aspect of James to memory, slowly and methodically deconstructing him until he is nothing at all except want. It's everything James wanted, everything he never quite dared to imagine -- only now it's _happening,_ the way he never thought it would. He's never thought of himself as the type for a whirlwind romance, and yet here he is, and he wouldn't wish himself anywhere else.

(Not yet.)

"You have a lovely flat," says Adam, when they pause for breath, and it's so incongruous and so _sweet_ that James can't help laughing. "No, you do! I love what you've done with it -- did you make the curtains yourself?"

He can't stop smiling, can't help himself even though it's starting to hurt. "And the cushion covers."

It earns him another kiss, long and slow and thorough enough to leave James melting. "You're perfect," Adam whispers, and his breath is warm against James's mouth. "You're completely perfect. I can't believe how lucky I am."

And neither can James, though he can't quite voice it -- he kisses Adam instead, once-twice-thrice, and almost laughs when he thinks of the Latin he studied in school. He'll lose count of the kisses eventually, and it won't matter at all; Catullus will already have counted for him. "Is there anything you want?" he asks, because he'll start quoting poetry if he doesn't start to consider the practicalities, and God knows it's too early for that yet. "Something to drink? I have wine, if you like."

"I think I'd rather just have you," Adam says, voice soft -- and then he laughs, and pulls James into a tight hug. "Sorry, sorry. I know that was awful. You're within your rights to throw me out for it."

James's laugh is muffled against Adam's shoulder; his smile imprints itself against the side of Adam's throat. He traces the curve of Adam's spine with his fingertips, and he says, "You can have me, if you like."

It's been long enough, hasn't it? Long enough spent tentatively flirting during costume fittings and alterations, never quite sure whether or not the flirting was being returned in kind; long enough spent watching rehearsals from backstage and wondering, hoping. They close the bedroom door behind them and shut out all of those concerns, shut out everything in the world but themselves and their bodies and the way James's heart won't stop racing, even when it's over. There is no room in the bed for anything else.

***

 **1987**  
It's not the sort of thing you can ignore, not these days. For one thing, the newspapers simply won't shut up about it. John sets one of them on fire on a street corner, drops it into a trash can as the flames catch and the edges of its front page go black -- for a scathing review of the musical that just closed, mostly, but it's just as satisfying to think of that God-awful fear-mongering front-page headline going up in smoke.

He meets Buzz for coffee; it's oddly pleasant to have remained on speaking terms with an ex, even an ex as profoundly frustrating as Buzz. He's volunteering at a clinic, now. He tells John this over the wipe-down plastic table between them, faint brown circles imprinted forever onto its surface. "It's a disease," he says, "same as any other. There's a cure out there somewhere, and you'd better believe we're going to find it."

"Hardly the same as any other." John has taken his coffee black; it isn't his habit, and the sheer force of the taste all but overwhelms his tongue. "Taking into account who's _catching_ it, it's hardly the same at all."

"Well, all right." Buzz waves a hand, airy and dismissive and irritating enough to John's teeth on edge. "The way people are looking at it, sure, _that's_ the difference. Which is why it's important for us to fight it, John -- people like us, and people who don't buy into the shit the newspapers are spewing. If we don't, who will?"

"I can't think what's brought on the Messiah act." John quirks a brow. "Have you been listening to Lloyd Webber again?"

"Laugh if you want to," says Buzz, with a shrug that somehow encompasses his whole body. "But for God's sake, don't do anything stupid. Or at least wait until we've fixed this thing before you do."

There's a pause. John takes another sip of his nigh-intolerable coffee. "He's gay, you know," he offers at last. "Lloyd Webber."

The look Buzz shoots across the table is very nearly pitying. "Too easy," he says. "Even _you_ know that."

***

The door to the clinic closes behind him quietly, all but drowned by the roar of traffic on the next street. James breathes in. The air tastes of exhaust fumes, cold enough to sting his lungs and throat. James breathes out.

He hadn't heard from Adam in almost four months. He'd moved on ably enough -- regretted the way things went, for a while, but it had always felt too good to be true; he knows that now, all too well. And then Adam managed to drive it home again, harder than ever before, when James picked up the phone one evening after work only to hear an unfamiliar fear in the voice he used to adore. "I've had some bad news," he'd said, and James had felt the world drop away beneath him, leaving him bereft of air or light or anywhere safe to stand. And then: "There's a clinic not very far from where you live, isn't there?" And then, at last: "I'm really sorry." James, not yet knowing, had forgiven him.

Even now that he knows, he can't bring himself to retract it. He won't call, he decides. There's no point; Adam knows, Adam knew from the moment he heard the news from his own doctor, and the last thing James wants is to commiserate with the man who has, however unwittingly, killed him.

That isn't fair. That isn't kind. He pauses at the street corner, watches the cars fly past in blurs of red and blue and white, tries to collect himself a little.

His flat looks just the same as it did earlier on, when he returns to it; the carpet still has that pristine just-vacuumed look, and the curtains Adam praised hang just where he left them in the window. It's as though it hasn't caught up with him yet, as though he has travelled an hour or two into the future and the rest of the world has not followed. He's waiting for the flat to collapse into disarray; he's waiting for the world to end, and it won't. Perhaps that's the strangest thing -- to think that this isn't the end of the world at all, no matter how it feels. The world will go on quite handily without him, when he dies. And it is a certainty, now, that he will die; really, it always was. But it has never been quite so certain as this.

James swallows back the nausea and goes to the kitchen, and the kettle.

It takes one cup of tea before he decides he's going to call someone -- not Adam, and definitely none of his other colleagues, but _someone._ Not his mother, either. She was sympathetic when he came out; perhaps she will be sympathetic again. James wants to believe it. But he can't bear the thought of disappointing her -- which ought to be the least of his worries, now. He knows that. And yet -- he sighs, and sets his mug aside. Not his colleagues, not his mother, and that leaves John in New York City. John, who only ever calls when he's drunk; John, who lives a life into which James has never been permitted insight. John, who has kept James pointedly at bay since they were children, and who has since put a whole ocean's worth of distance between them.

Well. It isn't as though he has options any longer.

He picks up the phone and presses the number slowly, deliberately into the keypad; it feels like extending a hand, like reaching out while drowning, and he wishes to God that it felt like anything else at all.

***

It should have been him, and he knows it. James doesn't do things with consequences like this; James doesn't make mistakes. James is the good twin. And meanwhile John spent every night of his last show's week-long run fucking a chorus boy against the mirror of a deserted dressing-room, and they called him today to tell him he's clean. Not that there's anything clean about him beyond his fucking bill of health. He knows quite well, has done all his life, that in every sense but the literal, he's poison.

He's clean, which means that chorus boy was clean -- and the dancer before him, and the fellow musician before _him,_ and all the ones who came before, whose names he's since forgotten. He's clean, which means he has been _disgustingly_ lucky. It sinks in only now just how lucky he's been -- he didn't care, he's never cared, and yet he's fine, he's healthy, while James's single uncharacteristic bad call means that James is going to die. James is going to end up like the men John set on fire in the newspaper, the men whose faces he didn't want to see; his brother the saint is going to die and it won't even be a proper fucking martyrdom. It will just be torture. It won't be fair.

John fires up his little electric kettle -- tea, today; coffee hardly seems sufficient. One day he will learn to suppress entirely the stupid childhood expectation that life treats people _fairly._

He finishes his first cup, moves onto the next; when it's half-finished, he thinks for a moment about calling Buzz. Only for a moment, though -- there's only so much Merman he can take at the best of times, only so much love and laughter he could tolerate even on a better day. And in any case, calling up one's ex to whine about the fundamental injustice of existence is not the sort of thing John Jeckyll _does_ , and God knows it would be an awful idea to break character so egregiously in front of Buzz, of all the former lovers in the world.

What John Jeckyll does is open a bottle of something old and strong he's been saving since _Anchors Aweigh!_ , years ago now, and stir a healthy measure of it into his half-finished cup of tea. If he can't go out cruising -- and he can't, not tonight; stupid as it is, he daren't -- then he can at least get drunk. And with style, at that.

(He gives up on style, and on the cups of tea, somewhere around midnight. By two o'clock in the morning, he's almost stopped thinking altogether.)

***

There is so much more to consider, these days. Work, for example -- his job is secure for now, while he at least looks like a healthy man, but what will happen when symptoms start to show? What will happen as his health deteriorates? More to the point, what if someone at the theatre finds out beforehand? Could they force him to leave? He doesn't know, never thought it would matter, and now that it does he can't quite bring himself to look it up.

He can't bring himself to look any of it up, really, though he knows he should. The clinic sent him away with leaflets enough to fill a bookshelf, and he hasn't read a single one of them. He knows all of the important parts, anyway -- keep taking the drugs they prescribed; no sex; remember how lucky you are not to have caught it earlier, when we knew even less about what we're doing. People used to die in just a few years, before, when the drugs James is taking didn't yet exist. It could be worse. He keeps telling himself this. It could be worse.

And life goes on, from day to day. It isn't as though the disease is all he thinks about; there are other concerns to occupy his attention. There are costumes to sew, fabrics to buy, broken sewing machines to fuss over and mend. Adam isn't at the theatre any longer, and James wishes he weren't so glad of it. It isn't kind, it isn't fair to be happy that he's elsewhere now, and yet James isn't sure how he could look him in the eye if he'd stayed. Really, he's relieved that he doesn't have to ask himself that question; he's relieved that his better nature isn't being tested that way. What that says about him, in the end, he isn't sure.

There's more to consider, but practically speaking, very little is different. He was hardly overwhelmed with offers of sex before; the diagnosis hasn't changed much there. Just like before, he goes to work every day and stops for groceries every other evening on the way home. Just like before, he spends his nights with a favourite film or a good book -- a glass of wine if he's tired, and perhaps the most significant change is that he's tired more often, now. He used to imagine that one day the rest of the world would catch up with him, that it would fall apart in sympathy, but it never did, and it never will. The world will keep turning, and James will keep living until he stops; the rest is detail, and he'll have to address it eventually, but _eventually_ hasn't happened to him yet.

At times, he wonders what might have happened if he'd thought, or if Adam had thought -- if they hadn't been so caught up in one another that they'd taken a little more care. Not often, though. Life goes on, at least for a little while, and James can't bear to waste what time he has left on regret.

***

Luck doesn't hold forever, of course -- winning streaks always break -- but that has never stopped John before. It won't stop him tonight. He leads his latest conquest to the bathroom by the hand, and he tries not to think about how warm that hand is in his own, how soft the skin. There's a row of mirrors on the bathroom wall streaked with fingerprints and spattered with soapy water, and John is not quite drunk enough to want to look; he drags the boy he found at the bar into the nearest unoccupied stall, and hopes that it looks more like lust than desperation.

The boy kisses like a drunk. John should have had another beer. John should have had _several_ more beers; maybe if he had, the strip-light overhead and the obscenities scribbled on the walls and the complete inability of his apparent partner to use his tongue with any finesse would be at least marginally more bearable. That said, at least it's familiar. It's easy enough to align their hips just so, take what gratification he can take from that since the kissing's hardly going anywhere; it's easy enough to wrap his arms around the boy's neck and relish the feeling of a warm, young body pressed tight against his own. He knows what he's doing. Even now. That hasn't changed.

James wouldn't have known how to do something like this. John wonders for a moment if this his how it happened -- if he tried it and it didn't take, if something went badly, if some faceless stranger under awful lighting looked at his brother's naivete and saw an opportunity. It wouldn't be so difficult if James didn't share his face. It wouldn't be so heart-stoppingly _frightening_ (and there it is, he said it) to think of it if he weren't in some way thinking of himself, in over his head and drowning, or with his head outright held underwater and no hope of breathing ever again--

"Wait," says John, when his back presses up against the door of the stall, and thank God, the boy -- Chad or Joe or whatever awful name he gave and John's already forgotten -- does as he's told, for at least long enough that John can reach into his back pocket and pull out a condom. "You're going to be wanting this," he says, and his fingers are clumsy and unpracticed as he tears the wrapper open.

The boy grins a lazy, drunken grin. His teeth are perfectly white, perfectly even. "Considerate of you," he says, and hooks his fingers into the waistband of John's jeans, draws them slowly down around his thighs. John watches him, with his blown-out pupils and the fading bite-mark bruises at his throat, and thinks: _No. Not really. Not at all._

He manages a smirk. "Anyway," he says, and once Chad's face or Joe's face or Harvey's face or whoever's face is turned to the graffiti-patterned wall, he lets himself close his eyes.


End file.
